242 ORGANIC EVOLVTION CONSIDERED 



he sailed past certain islands in the Pacific, he found 

 them inhabited by cannibals, but that twenty-five 

 years afterwards he found these cannibals converted 

 to Christianity and enjoying the blessings of civiliza- 

 tion. It is further said that in consequence of this 

 great change wrought by Christian missionaries, he 

 donated twenty-five pounds a year to the Missionary 

 Society. 



How many millions of years would it take for even 

 Christian missionaries to convert a tribe of gorillas 

 into man-loving, God-fearing, self-conscious beings 

 capable of believing that they possessed immortal 

 souls? 



The fact of such great and sudden changes pro- 

 duced in the lives of the most degraded savages 

 shows the infinite gulf between them and the highest 

 brutes. The more degraded man is shown to be in 

 his savage condition, the more wonderful becomes 

 the contrast between him and the highest animals 

 when he has the opportunities of civilization. Evo- 

 lution, instead of gaining, loses much by hunting up 

 degraded savages, for the lowest tribes have vastly 

 more capacity than the theory calls for or can explain. 



Mr. Darwin attempts to account for the moral sense 

 as follows: " Philosophers of the derivative school 

 of morals formerly assumed that the foundation of 

 morality lay in a form of Selfishness; but more re- 

 cently in the Greatest-Happiness principle. Accord- 

 ing to the view given above, the moral sense is funda- 

 mentally identical with the social instincts; and in the 

 case of the lower animals it would be absurd to speak 

 of these instincts as having been developed from 

 selfishness, or for the happiness of the community. 

 They have however, certainly been developed for the 

 general good of the community. The term "general 

 good," may be defined as the means by which the 



